An Author and a Lamb

I wrote An Author and a Lamb in 2016 while running a pet (pun intended) project about a fictional lamb.

An Author and a Lamb

Years ago, after a nasty motorbike accident left me stuck in bed for months, I found myself alone with a laptop, a cocktail of painkillers, and a brain that refused to shut up. I was in pain, I was bored, and I needed a way to escape the inside of my own head. Enter: Lamb. An Author and a Lamb to be exact.

Lamb was not a metaphor. Lamb was an actual lamb. He lived on a fictional farm with a bunch of other animals and a character called Herder, who was essentially his god. Lamb had opinions, delusions of grandeur, and a wildly inflated sense of self-importance. He also had a blog.

I wrote him. I was him.

The blog, lambsblog.com, existed for years and was written under the pseudonym belfusion. It started as a laugh, an outlet, a side effect of codeine and frustration. But something weird happened. Lamb became one of the most important characters I’ve ever created.

Why a Lamb?

Because I was pissed off, recovering from trauma, and in desperate need of control. Lamb gave me that. Through him, I got to mock the world, rant about pain, fall in love with Herder, and nurture a barn full of neurotic farm animals who probably mirrored the people in my real life.

Lamb felt misunderstood, superior, emotional, irrational, proud, fragile, and sometimes completely deranged. So yes, he felt very familiar.

Writing as Lamb was therapy with hooves.

The World of the Farm

Lamb adored Herder. In his world, Herder rescued him from a broken farm and elevated him above all other animals. And Lamb, true to form, soaked up the praise, ran the farm like a boss, and believed the sun rose for his benefit alone.

He helped feed the others. He monitored intruders. He kept Eric the pig from causing too much chaos, kept Sally the duck from falling into existential despair, and comforted the younger animals like a woolly sibling with boundary issues.

Writing as Lamb let me say things I didn’t know how to express. Rage, love, grief, loneliness. All of it came out through that bleating lunatic.

People Actually Read It

I didn’t expect anyone to read Lamb’s blog. But they did. Mostly young readers. Some sent fan mail. Some asked about Lamb’s adventures. Some told me he helped them laugh when they needed it most.

That’s when I realised this wasn’t just my personal breakdown masquerading as a children’s blog. This was connection.

Letting Lamb Go

Eventually, I let lambsblog go. Life changed. I got better. I focused on other things. I stopped renewing the domain. But Lamb still lives in my head, and he still pops up in my writing now and then. Like a ghost of creative therapy past, still demanding attention and scratching at the barn door of my brain.

If you were one of the few who met Lamb back in the day, you know how strange and brilliant that little world was.

And if you’re just finding out about it now, sorry you missed the madness. But maybe that’s for the best.

Why I’m Telling You This

People still ask me about Lamb. Why I wrote as a farm animal. Why I stuck with it for so long. Why I stopped. So this blog is my answer.

Lamb was weird. He was funny. He was intense. And he got me through one of the hardest times in my life.

And while I’ve moved on to write books like Monique, Toby, and more recently The Hole in the Door, I’ll always have a soft spot for the wool-covered little maniac that helped me survive my own wreckage.

Lamb might be gone. But the writing and the chaos live on.

Keep up with newer work in categories like, Memoir & Real Life, Bromance, GloryHole Archives and Narcissism. Oh yeah.. I’m writing a memoir called, Good Luck Getting Rid of Me that I will never let Lamb read.